Transcript: Everything Darian DeVries said at his introductory press conference

Indiana introduced Darian DeVries as its 31st head basketball coach on Wednesday morning.

Here’s a full transcript from his introductory press conference:

DARIAN DeVRIES: Thank you, everyone, for being here today. It’s truly an honor for me to be standing here as the head coach at Indiana University. I want to start off by thanking President Pam Whitten, Athletic Director Scott Dolson, and the board of trustees for this opportunity to lead this historic basketball program.

One year ago today I took the West Virginia job after I’d left Drake University because I felt like it was a great fit for myself, for my family. It had an administration that I greatly respected and a fan base that was very supportive and a community that was filled with great people.

All that turned out to be true in the past year and we were welcomed with open arms. We met some terrific people, and my family and I are beyond thankful for that.

Obviously my intention was to continue down that path and build on the progress that we made during this first year. However, the opportunity came along to possibly be the head coach at Indiana, a dream job for anyone, but especially for someone that grew up in the Midwest watching the old Big 8 and Big 10 basketball.

The chance to lead one of the biggest brands in college basketball was something that I could not pass up.

This place has many of those same qualities that my family and I look for and want to be around, and I’ve always looked for that fit for myself, for my family, and making sure it all aligned.

We have an administration here that is 100 percent in alignment with navigating through this whole new era of college athletics, from the top down. There’s no doubt that there’s an extreme commitment to making sure we are on the upper edge of all of that. There are resources available here that are some of the best in the entire country.

We have a fan base that is passionate about the Hoosiers and provides a tremendous home-court advantage. Everything is in place here for us to have the opportunity to win and to win at a high level. Now our job is to make that happen.

I am so excited to get to work, and I know that where it all begins is with the work. It has to start and end there, because without that, you cannot have success.

Resources certainly are a huge part of giving you those opportunities, but resources do not win games. We want to be a very process-oriented program with a core fabric built around that work. The people we surround ourselves with and the players that have a desire to want to be a part of something special.

We want to build something that is sustainable for a long period of time, and we will do that by staying true to what this program is about. We will know when we have made it when every time a fan, a booster, an alumni, or a former player comes to watch us play and turns on the TV, and after that game is over, that they are filled with pride because they have so much respect for how our team plays, how unselfish they are, the joy they play with, and the enthusiasm they play with and their love for this university.

Once we get there, and once we get there where everyone can watch us on a nightly basis and they can say with great pride on a consistent level that that is my team, that is when the banners will rise again. It’s time for us to get to work.

Q. Just from your perspective, we’ve kind of heard President Whitten’s perspective, Scott Dolson’s perspective, but from your perspective, how did this unfold in terms of sitting with them to consider the Indiana job? What have the last couple days been like through your eyes?

DARIAN DeVRIES: Yeah, obviously the process is the process. I know how it plays out. As you’re going through their season, they were very respectful of making sure that my focus continued to be on our team and certainly appreciated that.

What I loved about how the process played out was from our very first conversation, there were certainly — we mentioned the word “alignment,” but there was an alignment to my vision, their vision, and how do we make this go together.

I think that’s very important because the way we want to build this program and build it to a level that is sustainable and be at a very high level, there are certain things that we feel — that I feel is important in our program.

I thought those all aligned with the administration as we went through that process, so getting into more details later about the offense, defense, all those type of things, but more importantly, that we can’t cheat the process. The work has to go into it. The type of players that we bring into our program have to match what we’re about.

I think the majority of your winning takes place on the very front end, your coaching staff, the players you bring into your program, what are their qualities, what’s important to them, are they self-starters, are they self-motivated, are they team players. Those type of things are all important to us.

As that process played out, it was clear and evident to me that this was going to be a great fit for myself, for our family, and can’t be more excited to be here.

Q. You’ve had to replace a significant portion of your roster each of the last two seasons. What lessons did you learn from those experiences? And obviously the resources are important, but what else in this era kind of defines roster building to you? What’s important?

DARIAN DeVRIES: I think the biggest thing and where you can get yourself in trouble is you’re not building a collection of players. You have to build a team, and a team has to be able to fit together, play together, win together, be able to function together.

That’s the number one thing, and I’ve had to do it now several times because basketball has changed. College athletics has changed. We’ve had multiple times now as a head coach we’ve had to sign nine, ten guys in a given season.

So I think it’s critical that you make sure that every player’s motivation is the right motivation for why they want to be a part of your program. If their motivations are right and you get enough of those individuals with those same type of aspirations, now you have a chance to put a team together; you have a chance to win together.

Q. As part of what you just said, you can sell a vision to the players. How do the players buy into your vision? What have you been successful in doing to make them believe that you’re the guy who can make that vision happen?

DARIAN DeVRIES: Anytime you’re at a new place, you can only use your past experiences and your coaching record and things. I think the biggest thing for them when I’ve had discussions with them is, hey, here’s you as a player; here’s how we play; here’s how we envision you.

And most importantly, be truthful. Talk to them about, hey, this is where we see you. We don’t make promises that we can’t keep. Everybody comes in basically on the same note of I’m going to come because I want to work hard, I believe this coaching staff can get me better, they can challenge me, they can motivate me, and I’m going to love that process. I’m going to love being where I’m at.

I think for us that’s extremely critical as you put a roster together and build your team.

Q. Just wanted to ask a basketball-specific question here. Your team I think when everybody was healthy was top 45 or so in three-point rate, averaged nearly 30 three-point attempts per game. Can you explain your offensive philosophy, what are the key components you want to have on the court every night, and how important is it to you from a roster construction standpoint to have multiple shot makers on the team?

DARIAN DeVRIES: Yeah, I think it’s critical for us as you’re building out a roster, and this year as — this past year at West Virginia as we took over a roster, there’s only one player that returned from the previous year.

So we put a roster together that we felt could fit and make the pieces fit as best we could during that spring signing period.

I think it’s critical in how we want to play because in the ideal world on a missed shot, turnovers, we would like to score in those first 12 seconds. That’s how we played. I was an assistant coach at Creighton University for a long time under Greg McDermott. Took that offensive philosophy with me to Drake, and then to West Virginia.

We feel like the best way to score is on a broken floor before the defense is set, so that’s our main priority from an offensive standpoint.

Then if you don’t score in those first 12 seconds, now we want to get the best shot available, whenever that may come.

But overall, shooting is a critical piece. We’re in a pretty decent spot. We lost a couple of our better shooters to injury this year so it did impact a little bit of our overall shooting for the season, but as we move forward and build a roster and roster construction, we want plenty of depth in the shooting areas because I think you can’t win if you don’t make shots. That’s a huge priority for us.

Q. You mentioned getting to know guys in terms of recruiting and figuring out what they’re about. How challenging is that in this new era where you have this really short window where you’re probably going to want guys in for visits pretty quickly? What are you looking for when you do have guys on campus to figure out whether there’s an alignment?

DARIAN DeVRIES: Yeah, that’s where your staff is critical. You have your staff put together their relationships with people and maybe you recruited them on the front end and they went somewhere else and now you’re getting an opportunity there. As many of those opportunities that you can where you have relationships, you’re going to do background checks.

As you mentioned, you used to have maybe two, three, four years to build up that type of background check. Now you get two or three weeks a lot of times.

I think for us, it’s very critical, and we put a lot of time and effort into talking to people that know the kid the best and then reading body language, reading teammates, all those type of things are so important to us.

Because when you have that basketball locker room, 13 to 15 guys, it doesn’t take one or two to really make that experience for everybody not as enjoyable. So we want to do the best job we can on the front end to make sure, hey, they’re all about the right stuff, they want to come here, they want to be a part of a winner, they want to be self-motivated to accept the challenges to become the best they can be, and then play to win. That’s ultimately what you’ve got to do.

As you mentioned earlier, you put enough of those guys in a room together, you can get some pretty good success from that.

Q. Curious on your approach to non-conference scheduling. How do you look at that?

DARIAN DeVRIES: Yeah, Big Ten conference play, we got 20 of those games, so you’ve got to get yourself ready for it, and we want to challenge ourselves in the best way possible to make sure we’ve got some very meaningful non-conference games.

I know we have a couple already scheduled for this year. I think I’m allowed to say a couple of them. We have Kentucky scheduled, and I believe we have Marquette scheduled in Chicago. I believe those are the two that we have currently scheduled.

So we’ll continue to work on building on that, as well, and we’d love to get another one or two really good high-quality games and then add that to the 20-game Big Ten schedule.

You have to do a good job of — you’ve got to get your home games, as well, but also make sure we do a great job of getting ourselves ready for Big Ten play and challenging ourselves before we start that.

Q. What gives you the confidence as a coach that you can lead this program to long-term stability and success?

DARIAN DeVRIES: For me, I think sometimes as coaches, we don’t want to make it too difficult. Simplify it. Make it what it is. We’ve got to be good at these certain things. You’ve got to have a certain level of talent, but then the teams that can do defensive rebounding, taking care of the ball, playing together, playing unselfish, the teams that can do that the best typically are the teams that have the most success, and that’ll be our focus when we put a roster together. Just make sure those things are all priorities.

You certainly want to have as much talent as you can, but that talent has to be able to play together. So when we put that roster together, that’s going to be our focus. How will this group function together when we put them out there on game night.

Q. As far as recruiting, how do you want to weigh high school and college?

DARIAN DeVRIES: Yeah, certainly everything has changed from five, ten years ago in terms of high school recruiting, the portal and things. In our ideal world we would build it from the high school up.

This first year, that’s not possible. We’re going to have to fill some holes in the roster through the portal, and then your hope is in each year, you might lose a guy or two.

Your hope is they love it here so much that nobody ever wants to leave here, and then you replace a few guys from the portal, continue to build through the high school, hopefully as a sophomore. Then you can keep two or three high school kids and get two or three freshmen, and now over the course of time you’re going to be able to build some consistency within your roster.

The last thing you want to do is every year come in and have to sign 10, 11 new guys. That’s just hard to make it function. The first year you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do to get a roster put together, and then we build from there. Hopefully that retention is as close to 100 percent as we can because, like we said, they just love it here, they enjoy it, we’ve got the resources for them to stay here.

Now you can build consistency, and that’s ultimately what you want to get to.

Q. You had a high-major job; some people say this job is a fishbowl here. What do you think it says about you personally that you didn’t hesitate and jumped right into this opportunity?

DARIAN DeVRIES: I hope everybody, every fan base wants to win. I want to win. We all want to win. The passion is awesome. You want passion in a fan base. You want that. You thrive off that. Our players thrive off that. Nobody is going to want to win as bad as I do or our players do or our staff does or our fans do.

So from my standpoint, let’s do that together. As a fan base, as a community, let’s rally around one another to let’s go make this thing happen and let’s take this thing to as high a level as we can and try to put that on a consistent basis.

I love the fact that we have a passionate fan base. I think it’s awesome.

Q. I know it’s soon, but will you talk to the current team members that are still here, the recruits, about whether or not there will be a place for them? And how do you look to adjust that into what you’re building with your roster?

DARIAN DeVRIES: Yeah, we’re going to try to get with everybody individually. I will hear in these next few days. A few of them are gone on spring break. But I’ll get that chance to get in front of all of them, talk about, hey, I didn’t recruit you, you didn’t recruit me, either, so let’s see where they’re at.

Like I say, it all comes down to fit. If we have some guys on the current roster that still would love to be here and it seems to make sense for both of us, let’s do that. And if there’s some guys that feel like they can find a better connection somewhere else, there’s no hard feelings there. They didn’t come here because I was the head coach, so I understand that.

Then as you move forward, now it’s just us going out and finding the guys to fill around whatever holes there are. But I think it’s always good to take a few days to get in front of them, get to know each other. This is our first conversation together. So let’s see what that looks like for everybody.

Q. You had quick turnarounds at both West Virginia and Drake; I think a 10-win improvement at West Virginia from before you got there. What were some of the key points to generating that rapid success and how do you kind of apply that to Indiana?

DARIAN DeVRIES: Yeah, I hate to be repetitive on it, but I think it’s on the front end. I think when you’re very particular about the guys you recruit and don’t give into it, the process is the process. Your standards are your standards. Make sure that when we go out that we’re not making exceptions to what we believe is important.

When you have to sign nine, ten guys, it’s easy to go like, oh, let’s just give in for this particular one, and we’re just not going to do that.

I know our staff, sometimes we get frustrated with, like, hey, we got this kid, we can get here, here’s a few of the red flags, and we’re out. We just really believe that locker room is critical because you cannot survive without a good locker room.

That’s what we’ll always make our focus.

Q. Darian, this program over the last 25 years has really kind of toed the line between honoring the past and living in the past. As a newcomer walking into a program with such history and tradition, how do you view that back and forth? How do you uphold one side without going too far to the other?

DARIAN DeVRIES: I think you embrace everything about the past. That’s awesome. Our history is our history, and it’s a great history. Why would we not want to embrace that?

Now my job is what the future looks like, and that’s what we want to do is we want to be a part of that history and be a positive part of that history. That for us is, like all former players and alumni from here, yeah, we want to embrace them. That’s awesome. This is their program. They built this thing.

We want to be a big part of that as we move forward. That’s our goal.

Q. Over 20 plus years on the sidelines; how gratifying is it for you as a coach to have this opportunity of a lifetime, and does it feel like hard work finally paying off for you here with this opportunity with IU?

DARIAN DeVRIES: Yeah, as I mentioned, this is one of the premier schools, basketball schools in the entire country. To be standing here today, and you go back and look back 28 years ago as a GA and where you started — and I’ve loved every place I’ve been.

That’s what I love the most. Your coaching journey is special. It’s unique for everyone. I’ve enjoyed my time when I was a grad assistant at Creighton all the way up through assistants and head coaching, and now I’m looking forward to this next step.

I believe we can do some special things here, so I’m really excited about what that can look like and the people that are committed to making that happen, and we’re going to do everything that we can from our time and efforts to make it a reality.

Q. You mentioned being oriented. Do you credit that for your winning percentage in the close games that Scott mentioned? And two, what does oriented look like in games versus practice and just overall for you?

DARIAN DeVRIES: Yeah, I think you’ve got to give credit to the players. A lot of times in those late games, like the execution piece and guys making plays, getting stops, all those things that hopefully from June until that January 12th game when you needed it, they put in that time and effort to put themselves in a position to go make those plays.

From a practice standpoint, I believe in a very up-tempo, enthusiastic, energetic practice slot. We don’t sit out there for three hours. We go as hard as we can for about an hour and a half as the season goes on, 60, 70 minutes. But it’s very detail oriented, fast paced, and I think guys just get so much more out of that, and they learn a lot quicker to be put in those game situations that now they don’t have to think. They’ve done it every day. They’ve had to react on it and be quick on their feet, simulated by every practice that we have.

Q. Darian, we heard Dr. Whitten talk about the CEO aspect of being a college basketball coach and in your eyes what does that mean for you leading a program to be a CEO?

DARIAN DeVRIES: Yeah, when you look at it and go, there’s a lot of people that are underneath that head coach, from assistant coaches to ops people to managers to the players to support staff; all very critical parts of your success.

So I think that, again, it’s how do we get everybody so that we’re all going in the same direction. We all have the same goals, and how do we make everybody’s path align with that.

It starts from the top, and then they’ve got to feed off of me and the way I act and I interact with the people I’m around, and then it carries over all the way on down.

I think when you get that, it’s kind of a thing of beauty because you can just tell everybody is in sync. When you can see a team and how in sync they are and how connected they are, that’s what I want our program to be from the top to the bottom. I want there to be a connectivity from every single person that touches our program.

That’s what I think a good CEO does. He empowers everybody to be the best they can be, and they’re all striving to do that because they know they get the opportunity to be themselves and to grow within our program.

And that’s what’s exciting, especially when you’re just starting a new program or a new job here is all of these people that are going to be a part of our success.

Q. Darian, this is a program with National Championship pedigree but not much success in this century. How do you unlock the full potential of this program?

DARIAN DeVRIES: Again, I’m not going to sit here and say we’re going to win this amount of games or that amount of games. We’re going to really focus on every day the process of what does it take to win games. If at the end of the day we’re really good at that, those things will happen.

But that’s our single priority is very narrow focused on being elite at all those little things.

The wins and losses, they’re going to work themselves out because if you can do all those things the way you need to do them and the way I believe we can do that, then the wins are going to come.

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